The Playwright As Entertainer.

BOOK REVIEWS THE PLAYWRIGHT AS ENTERTAINER. Some recent experiences of seeing plays and reading books about playwrights have continued to confirm my belief that greater offenses against the allied arts of drama and theater are committed by academic people than theater people, even though the latter· group have in the past decade indulged themselves in a glorious debauch of improvised self-gratification, usually at the expense of the playwright, and often the audience. Several years ago at an MLA seminar on modem drama I tried to make a somewhat similar observation in a room filled with earnest academics and I was treated with the polite scorn reserved for harmless heretics. There is little doubt in my mind that that ironic heresy has now become mere reality-modern theater production is anarchic and alive. But I don't want to prescribe anarchy for the academic critics of drama, though an unmeasured dose of it now and then might purge some of the more pedagogical types of their solemn endeavors, just as an occasional demonstration of emotional thrift might save some of the more profligate action-theater people from their narcissistic immolations. What I want to do is describe and consider the consequences of two possible causes of the unfortunate situation in modern drama and theater, one related to motivation, the other to morality. In the first instance, the impulse which generally motivates the scholar-critic is a calculated quest for information and insight and the ordering of them in a logical pattern of useful knowledge; while the impulse which generally motivates the director-actor is an instinctive quest for imagination and passion and the release of them through an apocalyptic experience in the theater. This does not mean that we have not often been confronted by instinctive scholars and calculating actors, apocalyptic critics and pedagogical directors; nevertheless, such surprises have come too seldom in our time. What happens at crucial moments in history such as our own-perhaps all moments can be crucial and it is an inevitable process that goes on all the time-is that each group feels threatened by the absolute methods of the other which forces them to retreat into extreme expressions of their original motives; with the consequence that both groups assail us with desperate alarums of salvation and/or destruction by fire and/or ice. That there are few if any temperate zones of compromise, in life or art, may be a good thing and means that we are still near the eye of the revolution. If we recognize some familiar dualisms at work here, Dionysus vs Apollo or Youth vs Age, we would be less than candid if we did not also recognize that, even without the fringe benefits of nudity and the rites of sex, the youthful Dionysians are annihilating the ageing Apollonians in modern drama and theater. In the second instance, the cause of this annihilation of the Apollonians in our time has its roots in the traditional reaction against the shot-gun marriage of art and morality, an arbitrary union with a rather ancient lineage which fortunately breeds the engines of its own dissolution. Every generation of artists, more often inside the theater than outside, has had to fight for the divorce of those unfortunate incompatibles, art and morality. The artist may be a moralist and the moralist may be an artist, but this does not mean that art must be moral any more than morality must be artistic. They are incompatibles whenever they are joined together in an inviolable embrace, as if some universal law of god or 336 1970 BOOK REVIEWS 337 nature preordained it. They are in~ompatibles because the artist chooses at his own risk to be moral, immoral, or amoral, just as the moralist, immoralist, or amoralist chooses at his own risk to be artistic or otherwise. The suc~ or failure of all these choices isa matter of talent, vision, and technique, and the rest is irrelevant. Therefore, when experimental or radical forms of art· are attacked by the moralist as frivolous and dangerous entertainment-mere entertainmentwhat is really being attacked is the fundamental element of sheer fun in art; what is really being condemned is...